Iraqi forces make key gains in Ramadi push
Soldiers, police engage in fierce battle with Islamic State fighters.
— An assault by Iraqi BAGHDAD forces to wrest control of Ramadi from the Islamic State has reached the edge of the city center in a battle thatwas months in the making and a critical test for the Iraqi government.
Accompanied by heavy U.S. airstrikes, the push into the city by a mix of Iraqi soldiers, police officers and Sunni tribal fighters began overnight. Iraqi officials described the assault Tuesday as a fierce urban battle, with their forces facing car bombs, sniper fire and explosive traps.
Around 300 Islamic State fighters were believed to be hunkered down in the northern reaches of the city.
If Iraqi forces manage to reassert control over Ramadi — the provincial capital of Anbar province in the Sunni Arab heartland — it would be the most important of a series of military setbacks for the Islamic State since its explosive expansion across Iraq that began with the capture of the key northern city of Mosul last
year.
In early April, Iraqi forces and Shiite militias drove the Islamic State out of the city of Tikrit, and in October retook control of the northern city of Baiji and its oil refinery.
Last month, Kurdish and Yazidi forces assaulted the northern city of Sinjar, driving out fighters with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
The capture of Ramadi, 60 miles from Baghdad, would give the government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi a badly needed moral victory, and an example of successful cooperation with the country’s alienated Sunni population. But more important, it would allow Abadi’s often disparaged military to reverse a humiliating loss.
Ramadi fell to the Islamic State in May, in a sudden collapse after a long battle that exposed multiple weaknesses in the government’s ability to fight the militants, including stark military shortfalls and disorganization, and an unwillingness by the government to arm or send reinforcements to help Sunni tribesmen who were fighting the militants.
The rapid advances Monday and Tuesday held out hope that after months of preparation, the government had finally marshaled a large enough force to prevail in Ramadi, and begin a wider operation to fight the Islamic State in other areas of Anbar province.
“I think the fall of Ramadi is inevitable,” Col. Steven H. Warren, the U.S. military spokesman here, said Tuesday. But he added: “That said, it’s going to be a tough fight.”
Other crucial battles, like the ones for Tikrit and Baiji, dragged on for weeks or months.
Over the past month or so, Iraqi security forces and tribal fighters have encircled Ramadi.
Two weeks ago, they seized a large neighborhood, Tamim, on its southwestern outskirts.
“We went into the center of Ramadi from different axes, and we started clearing residential areas,” Gen. Sabah al-Numani, a spokesman for the army counterterrorism unit in charge of the offensive, said in a statement Tuesday.
He predicted that “the city will be cleared within the coming 72 hours.”
Six hundred to a thousand Islamic State fighters were said to have been in Ramadi when the offensive began, but several hundred of them have been killed in heavy fighting since then, according to Iraqi and Western officials.
Those remaining did not appear to be giving up easily. They destroyed three bridges over the Euphrates River to prevent security forces from entering the city, according to Gen. Ahmed al-Belawi, the leader of a battalion of Sunni tribal fighters.
Warren said that Iraqi forces had crossed the river by deploying “floating bridges,” as U.S. troops had trained them to do.
Iraqi airplanes dropped leaflets Sunday urging residents of Ramadi to evacuate within 72 hours, warning of an impending operation, and suggesting two evacuation routes. Warren estimated that thousands or even tens of thousands of civilians were still in the city.
In a briefing Tuesday, Warren said that coalition forces had recovered what he said were Islamic State leaflets in the nearby city of Fallujah urging its fighters — if they lose control of the city — to impersonate Iraqi security forces and commit atrocities.
The authenticity of the leaflets could not be independently confirmed, and experts on the Islamic State were debating their validity after the coalition publicized the leaflets Tuesday.
Even if the Iraqi military finally does reclaim Ramadi from the Islamic State, regional experts warn, the Sunni city will not take kindly to being overrun by the Shiite-dominated Iraqi military.